Saddle saws

Escaping from your parents or riding in the centenary Tour de France - Matt Seaton finds that cycling brings out the best in people in
Tim Hilton's One More Kilometre and We're in the Showers and
Matt Rendell's A Significant Other

There have been some lean years in the literature of cycling - whole decades when the only intellectual sustenance for the hungry fan would be the slim volumes of autobiography by former professionals. These were, as a rule, scarcely literate, stuffed with cliché and chiefly comprising stories of outrageously self-justifying score-settling. Then came last year's rush to capitalise on the centenary of the Tour de France, creating an entire peloton of cycling books, of which one or two were excellent, some were good and a few can be quickly forgotten.

So it is pleasantly surprising to find that, with less haste and more loving care, the renaissance of cycling writing continues. One senses that, for Tim Hilton in particular, a former art critic both on this newspaper and the Independent on Sunday and author of an acclaimed biography of John Ruskin, there was suddenly a morning when he woke up and reflected that cycling might, after all, be a subject serious and worthy enough for literary endeavour. It is soon revealed that cycling has occupied a very central place in his life - certainly, I'd guess, as significant and intimate a place as art history and criticism. Cycling was Hilton's means of escape - from the claustrophobia of being an only child, the child moreover of communists.

To have communist parents in the 1940s was faintly exotic, but perhaps not as strange as it seems today. To be born into a "Party family", though, if not actually traumatic, was certainly an experience that set one apart. One feels for the young Tim, having to pass around the snacks as the comrades meet at his parents' house in Birmingham for their weekly discussion of dialectical materialism. No wonder he was soon off on his bike.

As Hilton quickly observes, however, it was largely to his egalitarian upbringing that he owed his affinity for cycling and his ability to make friends among the clubmates and people he met along the way. Artists rub shoulders with artisans in cycling's classless fellowship of the road - not forgetting, Hilton remarks, the strong representation of posties, whose habits of rising early and clocking off at lunchtime mesh perfectly with the requirement of amateur racing cyclists for "getting the miles in".

One More Kilometre is not simply a memoir: it is a deeply affectionate mental scrapbook of cycling lore. Some has the flavour of very personal nostalgia - here is Hilton's memory of sleeping rough before an early-morning time trial: "I am old enough to remember the haystacks and still think it was a good way to spend a Saturday night." But much of the book consists of his impressions of the cycling heroes of the 40s, 50s and 60s, and their epic battles. In that respect, Hilton is typical of his generation - as he says, "All old wheelmen like such stories". The difference, of course, is that Hilton has the skill as a writer to make such well-worn subjects as the great postwar rivalry between the Italian duo Fausto Coppi and Gino Bartali fresh and compelling again.

And Hilton's breadth of knowledge and interest is considerable. How fascinating to discover, for instance, that Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot has a cycling connection. One Roger Godeau was a track ace at Paris's Vélodrome d'hiver after the war - this when the Vél d'hiv was still haunted by the fact that it had been used as a transit camp for 12,000 Jews, shamefully rounded up during the occupation by the French police. From that detention, they were transported to Drancy and thence to Auschwitz. In the late 40s, some of the boys who hung around the stadium for a sight of their cycling heroes told Beckett one day: " On attend Godeau." So Beckett perhaps had this melancholy setting, not to mention the shadow of the Holocaust, in mind when he was scripting the lines of Vladimir and Estragon.

Still, as a former member of "the Party" myself, I enjoyed most what was idiosyncratically Hilton's own story. He recalls with real feeling his relationship with the daughter of the celebrated communist historian Christopher Hill. Fanny Hill - as she was mischievously named by her father, after the heroine of John Cleland's then almost-unknown novella, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure - had no particular interest in cycle racing but would stitch Hilton's tubular tyres for him devotedly.

He remembers how he once took her for a drink at a pub in Stratford and bought her a bottle of stout, which she had never tasted. She took a long draught straight from the bottle before declaring: "Oh, Timoshenko, how lovely, it tastes just like sperm!" Evidently, Fanny, like Tim himself, had been brought up in the bohemian wing of the party.

Compared with Hilton's exuberant ragbag of cycling lore, Matt Rendell travels light. His focus is tight but purposeful, so as to tell a larger story. A Significant Other concentrates on the role of what is known in cycle sport as the "domestique", literally the servant. Relations on a professional cycling squad are essentially feudal: the serf exists to serve his master, belongs to him, even. At any moment, the domestique may be called upon to sacrifice his strength, his own standing in the race, and even his bicycle to the ulterior needs of the team leader. His reward for this job, which automatically denies him glory, is to share in the spoils of the team's victory: by tradition and convention, the prize money is shared out equally among team-members.

Rendell elegantly elucidates the tactical technicalities of cycling's unique mixture of cooperation and competition, teamwork and individualism. Here he explains one of cycle racing's most salient facts, the effect of drafting or slipstreaming: "Diving into the comet's tail, the rider in second position has only to produce 71% of the first rider's work rate to maintain the same speed. Carried along by these two, riders three, four and the rest can keep up on just 64% of the first rider's graft."

This is a topic that could, of course, become a bit of a textbook. The beauty of Rendell's brief book is that he has secured the cooperation of a real-life domestique, the Colombian Victor Hugo Peña, who was a key member of Lance Armstrong's US Postal squad on his way to a record-equalling fifth Tour win last year. Through Peña's transcribed first-person accounts of racing for Lance, Rendell places us right in the midst of the swarming bunch. It is the details that tell: who, watching the Tour on TV, thinks of the journeyman pro's daily struggle to force down bowls of pasta and rice for breakfast - the carbohydrate fuel vital for the day, when thousands of calories will be expended during hours in the saddle?

In his choice of Peña, who proves an unusually articulate subject, Rendell hit gold: Peña himself won the leader's yellow jersey after his team's performance in the team trial on stage 4. Three days later, Peña was back in 103rd place - not because he could not climb the Alpine passes as well as anyone, but because he had dedicated himself to protecting the interests of his leader, Armstrong. Rendell could not have found a more precise illustration of the pathos of the domestique's debt of duty and his sacrifice.

· Matt Seaton's The Escape Artist: Life from the Saddle is published by Fourth Estate. To order One More Kilometre for £14.99 plus p&p or A Significant Other for £9.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875.